… as the world becomes even more random and confusing, the brain very slowly adjusts its highest level parameters. It concludes, on a level much deeper than consciousness, that the world does not make sense, that it’s not really useful to act because it’s impossible to predict the consequences of actions, and that it’s not worth drawing on prior knowledge because anything could happen at any time. It gets a sort of learned helplessness about cognition, where since it never works it’s not even worth trying. The onslaught of random evidence slowly twists the highest-level beliefs into whatever form best explains random evidence (usually: that there’s a conspiracy to do random things), and twists the fundamental parameters into a form where they expect evidence to be mostly random and aren’t going to really care about it one way or the other.

Antipsychotics treat the positive symptoms of schizophrenia – the hallucinations and delusions – pretty well. But they don’t treat the negative symptoms much at all (except, of course, clozapine). Plausibly, their antidopaminergic effect prevents the spikes of aberrant prediction error, so that the onslaught of weird coincidences stops and things only seem about as relevant as they really are.

But if your brain has already spent years twisting itself into a shape determined by random coincidences, antipsychotics aren’t going to do anything for that. It’s not even obvious that a few years of evidence working normally will twist it back; if your brain has adopted the hyperprior of “evidence never works, stop trying to respond to it”, it’s hard to see how evidence could convince it otherwise.

And my position on the larger problem of meaning is to notice that my life always seems really meaningful and great when I have coffee. If I’m going to try to figure out what the actual meaning of life is, in some sort of deep principled way, I’m going to do it with as much attention to Truth as possible. And if I’m going to give myself some emotional hack that lets myself go on and continue finding life worth living, I think caffeine probably has fewer side effects than falsehood, and is just as effective.

And if you don’t respond to caffeine as well as I do, then I think the overall lesson is that the emotional problem of meaning is a basically biological one, that doesn’t connect with the philosophical problem of meaning nearly as much as you think. Get a good psychiatrist and you’ll solve the emotional problem. The philosophical problem might not be solvable, but “helping others” or “creating a positive singularity” or “[your ingroup’s political goals here]” are, though not Perfectly Objectively Grounded, grounded enough that most people don’t really want to question them once the emotional problem is solved.

I find some of Peterson’s non-truth-value-having writing effective in the same sense as caffeine; it makes me more emotionally willing to follow the truths I know I should be following. Since, jokes aside, I can’t literally be drugged 100% of the time, I appreciate that. And maybe the drug would be stronger if I were to swallow his truth-value-having claims too. But that’s not a risk-benefit profile I’m okay with right now.

To put it in more sociological terms: Reasons are social constructs. They are constructed by distorting and simplifying our understanding of mental states and of their causal role and by injecting into it a strong dose of normativity. Invocations and evaluations of reasons are contributions to a negotiated record of individuals’ ideas, actions, responsibilities, and commitments. This partly consensual, partly contested social record of who thinks what and who did what for which reasons plays a central role in guiding cooperative or antagonistic interactions, in influencing reputations, and in stabilizing social norms. Reasons are primarily for social consumption.

It seems to me (but what do I know) that the things I cling to most tightly are the things I perceive as most inseparable from my unique self—memories (and the sense of having a sharp memory), quirks, moral traits, and as Mercier and Sperber remind me, reasons. Reasons on all tiers, for all objects: reasons for supporting decentralized governance, reasons for abstaining from pork, reasons for trusting A and not trusting B. Turns out, all of these things are inaccurate by design, hazy at best.

The good news is that even a momentary release from identification with them—whether experienced or merely conceived—feels very freeing. I want more of where that came from.

This is not to distort Mercier and Sperber (or any descriptive attempts at cognitive psychology) toward the end of an idealized post-self that overcomes its “deceptive” programming, and casts off the shackles of narrative once and for all. We are built to deal with our environment exactly as we need to, given the constraints of our evolutionary history. There is nothing sinister about this.

And even if there were, we’d be kidding ourselves if we thought there was a way out. That said, our self-awareness shouldn’t be limited to the psych lab and the page. An honest appraisal of why we tell the stories we tell about ourselves reveals a bundle of fictions. What does that mean for that grand frame story, identity?

1. That it’s functionally important, and largely for social reasons.but:
2. That it’s not so important that we should let it hurt us.

The work of taking our attachments (and the I they add up to) less seriously is what we might call a “mental health hack”, with roots as far back as the Gangetic Plain, 2,500 years ago. Studying cognitive psychology, and chewing on its ideas, wherever we find ourselves, can be part of this work.

Metasystematicity is closely related to the complete stance. It is the attitude that systems of meaning are of great value (because meaning is patterned), but none can be complete or fully correct (because meaning is nebulous). Instead, we must deploy multiple systems, comprehend and negotiate the conflicts and synergies among them, and be willing to act even when no system can guide us.

If you dig David Chapman’s approach, this—the future-building series—is the node of Meaningness you should be engaging with most closely. The quote is a nice restatement of Meaningness’ applied nonduality, and just that. Do read the whole post.

For Pyrrho, like other thinkers in Greece and India at the time, philosophy was first and foremost a practice. It was only by applying such ideas in one’s life that their value was realized. Their aim was not intellectual knowledge but a radical transformation of one’s entire outlook on oneself and the world.